1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cooking device or range with a glass-ceramic panel made of transparent colorless material or, alternatively, with a glass panel made of pre-stressed special transparent colorless glass. The glass-ceramic or pre-stressed glass panel provides a cooking surface, which has cooking zones heated with respective radiant heating elements. More particularly the present invention relates to a glass-ceramic or pre-stressed glass panel of the above-described type on which a decoration is applied and whose underside has an IR transparent coating made of temperature-resistant paint.
2. Description of the Related Art
A cooking devices or ranges with glass-ceramic panels providing a cooking surface are currently state of the art. They typically have a glass-ceramic panel, as set forth in European Patent Document EP 0 220 333, which is colored in bulk with color-imparting ions that reduce transmission through the glass-ceramic panel. Thus the operating components of the cooking range underneath the glass-ceramic panel are practically not observable from above the range. This type of cooking surface is non-transparent for all practical purposes and appears black when observed from above.
Cooking surfaces formed on the above-described glass-ceramic panels are generally provided with decorations for purely esthetic reasons or to differentiate or highlight functional zones, e.g. cooking zones, from other regions of the cooking surface. These decorations and their application to glass-ceramic panels are, for example, described in German Patent Application DE 44 26 234 C1 (=EP 0 693 464 B1) and DE 34 33 880 C2.
On account of the non-transparency of the colored glass-ceramic panel the decorations on the cooking surface, including the full surface decorated cooking surfaces known, for example, from German Patent Application DE 197 28 881 C1 (=DE 297 11 916.8 U1) are either typically printed by means of screen-printing, or subsequently burned-in or applied to the upper side of the panel according to transfer technology, according to the state of the art with ceramic paint based on enamel. The top or upper side of the cooking surface is nearly completely covered with a decoration in the case of the full surface decorated cooking surface.
German Patent Application DE 200 05 461 U1 discloses cooking panels made from a transparent, colorless glass-ceramic bulk material and printed on their underside with temperature-resistant paint. These paint coatings first serve to make the cooking panel non-transparent i.e. they replace the otherwise common bulk coloring so that the panel appears dark from above. Furthermore the underside coating is a color-imparting decoration, while the upper side of the glass-ceramic panel is decoration free, i.e. it is not coated.
Because of the single coating on the underside of the glass-ceramic panel printed with a dark color, dirt or the like, such as fingerprints, on this known cooking panel is more conspicuousness than otherwise. Also there is no protection of the upper surface from scratches, metal abrasion and usage marks.